The History of the innerbelt

a brief history of the akron innerbelt,
Jason SegEdy, Director of Planning and Urban Development, City of Akron

In August 1963, the City of Akron, Department of Planning and Urban Renewal released a report entitled A Perspective of the Akron Innerbelt.  This report recommended the construction of a brand-new freeway that would serve as a linkage between I-76/77 and State Route 8.  The idea was that the new freeway would help to revitalize Downtown Akron and would provide opportunities for economic growth in the core of the city.

In the 1960s, the concept of urban renewal was ascendant in the thinking about urban planning and urban policy in the United States.  The philosophy behind this concept was that many of the problems that cities were facing were due to the prevalence of old, densely-clustered housing, and a lack of modern freeway access, and that the solution was therefore to demolish the old housing and replace it with freeways and office parks.

And that’s exactly what happened in Akron.  In the late 1960s, the homes and businesses of people in the path of the proposed Innerbelt began to be purchased, and the residents relocated, to make way for the new highway. Like urban renewal projects elsewhere in the United States, most of these residents were African-American and lower-income.  Their neighborhoods were disrupted and, in some cases, destroyed to make way for a project that mainly benefitted wealthier white people living in Akron’s suburbs.

Construction on the freeway began in 1970.  The project was plagued by delays and cost-overruns from the beginning.  Even as early as late 1970s it was becoming apparent that the original premises for the roadway were flawed.  Instead of revitalizing Downtown Akron, the core of the city began declining even further, as Akron lost more people in the 1970s than in any other decade in its history.

For over a decade, the Innerbelt freeway was a road to nowhere, and did not connect to either I-76/77 or State Route 8.  Finally, in 1987, 17 years after construction began, the Innerbelt’s southern connection to I-76/77 was completed.  The remainder of the Innerbelt project, which would have connected the freeway to State Route 8, was abandoned, as completing the highway as originally planned was deemed to be too costly.

Because the Innerbelt was never completed as planned, traffic volumes on the new freeway were only 20% of what had been originally forecasted.  Not only had the freeway failed to revitalize Downtown Akron, but it was not even necessary from a traffic standpoint.

As such, in 1999, the City of Akron began to contemplate a future in which at least a portion of the failed highway would be reclaimed as public space.  Over the past several years, the parallel streets flanking the northernmost portion of the freeway have been reconfigured to carry the traffic that the freeway once carried, and the freeway itself has been abandoned.

Today, the City of Akron has plans to beautify the land that the freeway once occupied, and Mayor Dan Horrigan is planning on redeveloping at least a portion of the abandoned right-of-way as a linear park. Towpath Landing dovetails perfectly with the City of Akron's ongoing efforts to incrementally convert this former freeway right-of-way into a high-quality public space.